Expanding the Boundaries of Theater for over 30 Years

In the News

A.R.T. educators helped students delve more deeply into ‘Father Comes Home,' encouraging them to share their thoughts, providing a scene for them to read aloud, and even asking them to write their own epic poems about the experience.

The American Repertory Theater in Cambridge continues its commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks' new trilogy, Father Comes Home From The Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3), a co-production with The Public Theater in New York. Inspired by Homer's Odyssey, it centers on Hero, a slave who journeys from his plantation in Texas to the battleground and back again, to face a changed world as a changed man. Incorporating themes of love and betrayal, the price of freedom, and the worth of a man, the ambitious play offers insight into conditions for slaves in 1862 on the cusp of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Father Comes Home From The Wars, Parts 1, 2 & 3 is having its world premiere at the American Rep Theater in Cambridge. It’s a soul-searing, deeply insightful work, the first of three parts of an epic new play by Pulitzer Prize-winner Suzan-Lori Parks that cuts to the quick of the black experience in America.

Plays of this much intensity and focus demand total attention, and reward one with kaleidoscopic satisfaction; the more you reflect on what you've seen and heard, the more you find meanings, jokes, and intriguing connections.